Personal hygiene and physical training for women

by Anna M. Galbraith

The kind of place one chooses for her vacation will depend on where her home is. To dwellers in cities, the mountains and seaside resorts are the most beneficial. August is our most trying month, and every one who can would do well to take her vacation at that time, always selecting some resort north of her own home, so that she may have the additional advantage of a more bracing climate.

Maine furnishes many of the most beneficial of our health resorts, combining as it does so many attractions—its bracing atmosphere of pine forests, its beautiful scenery with vast expanses of water, and the great variety of diversions which it affords.

It is always wise to send an advance scout to investigate the place in which you contemplate spending your vacation. Avoid low and swampy land; investigate the character of the water-supply and the nature of the plumbing, together with the sewerage system, for it is all too frequent that an attack of typhoid fever follows an outing in the country. Every good summer resort should furnish facilities for a variety of outdoor sports—golf, tennis, boating, swimming, etc.

During the vacation needless exposure to the direct rays of the sun must be avoided. There is probably nothing which lowers the vital resistance, and so prepares the way for disease as much as exhausting exposure to the hot rays of the sun.

Long hours of sleep should be indulged in. The morning air is the most beneficial; it is, therefore, a good habit to retire early and to rise early.

If the vacation is not properly spent, it may be the means of doing more harm than good. On the other hand, if properly spent, vacations prepare one as nothing else can to meet and resist the vicissitudes of the following winter. It is the people who go off on long vacations who have the least need of the doctor’s care.

Sleep.—During sleep all the bodily functions are in abeyance and the secretions are diminished; respiration is slow and confined to the chest, so that the amount of inspired air is only one-seventh of that during the waking hours; the temperature of the body falls; less blood circulates through the brain; and the sensibility of the nerves to external stimuli is diminished. Sleep is not only par excellence the time of repose and recuperation of the brain and nerve substance, but it is the only time when, by the diminution of waste caused by the incessant activity of the brain, that the organ can be properly nourished, the deficit in nerve force canceled, and the surplus of energy stored up.

Without this absolute remission of brain activity every twenty-four hours an actual destruction of substance would occur, which, if persisted in, would be so depressing to the nervous functions as to be inconsistent with life, and this is the case in the concluding stages of fatal diseases.

The sleepy feeling caused by fatigue is due to the circulation in the blood of toxins resulting from tissue waste, which benumb the brain-cells; while the feeling of freshness and bien-être with which one awakens in the morning is due to the elimination of the fatigue products from the blood during sleep. If the blood of a tired dog be transfused into the veins of a perfectly fresh animal, the latter will immediately show symptoms of somnolence and seek a dark corner for sleep.

The medical authorities of to-day are pretty well agreed that eight hours of sleep is the minimum required for the maintenance of health, and all concede that the brain-worker requires more sleep than the manual laborer. Every moment after the feeling of languor presents itself is a strain upon the nerves and muscles which will sooner or later invalidate for life, and finally bring the victim to a premature grave. Habitual deficiency of sleep will undermine the strongest constitution.